Hi, On Mittwoch, 3. November 2010, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote: > I think we should evaluate the cost and benefits of doing this, and > make a decision based on that knowledge.
Right. I thought the benefits were obvious, just like you probably did, when
you changed the profile question yesterday, to display the expert options by
default. _That_ is a change everybody will notice and will put cognitive
strain on everybody, as there are now more options...
I havent seen the evalutation for that.
And if the evaluation of this is happening right now, I wonder why we dont do
the same for the DVD split: just do it and then see how it works out.
> What problems and advantages
> for the users, administrators, distributors and developers do you see
> for the current approach and a splitted approach. Perhaps something
> for a wiki page to gather the arguments for and against?
combined approach:
- useful for people installing both amd64+i386 edu machines
- less packages on the DVD, thus different installs for DVD+CD for everyone
- CD space issues, thus we install a kernel by default, which can only deal
with a single core and 1GiB RAM maximum.
splitted DVDs
- less useful for people installing amd64, which according to
popcon.skolelinux.org are 5% of our users
- more packages on the DVD, probably the same installation whether DVD or CD
based
- 686 kernel on the DVD, supporting multiple CPU cores and more then 1 GiB RAM
- amd64 DVD still exists, it's just an extra download for those few who need
it. 5% of our users suffer a bit, for 95% having real benefits.
To me it is+was obvious that the benefits outweight the costs.
Plus: AMD64 is a great architecture, but I fear that in real world school
scenarios i386 is most often installed instead+exclusivly, because it makes
using certain very common nonfree tools much easier: adobe flash, googleearth
and icaclient are all only available for i386. So every school I know just
ignores amd64 and uses i386. Having a fully contained i386 DVD would be the
most useful for those.
cheers,
Holger
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